If you hoover up scarce resources, apparently make a mint, or at least publicly boast about doing so, then you can expect the limelight to be turned on you.

Problem with limelight is that its intensity reveals all the ugly bits.

Remember, BTL has been around for ages. At first it was only the young would be OOs that were affected, but now they have grown older and been promoted.

Now they are becoming very influential people.

And they've got a limelight lamp.

Tough ain't it!

It's a really good point. The shift in power is inevitable and it won't just be housing.

I am no boomer but I am on the shirt tails of them. And as an 'all powerful upper management employee' aged just shy of 50, I have absolutely no doubt where the influence is shifting. Those spotty 'early twenty-year-olds' moaning about renting and student loans are now in their early 30's and are catching me up, and those in the mid 30's are starting to rub shoulders with me....indeed my boss is early 40's. I don't want to create a generation divide debate....only to state that in another 5 years time the influence will absolutely be in the hands of that younger generation and in 10 years time generation rent will be in power. I appreciate priveledge will prevail in many cases but even so the most influential will have had friends who are renting and who struggled. At that point HPC will hopefully be readily embraced rather than feared and protected from like today.

It's ever staggering stuff from 118. The latest suggestion with some acceptance from Busta that it's a reasonable idea is to contact the police and see if a few policeman would like to rent the place cheap for a few months to sort it out.

Like the police give a sh*t about protecting your investment, like they they haven't got anything better to do than speak to a landlord about it, like policeman haven't got a life of their own to lead or that even if they were just sitting around waiting for the opportunity to move into a crap house that they would be inclined or allowed to indulge in some off duty vigilante behaviour in order to sort out these 'druggies'.

Deluded entitled t*ssers. It beggars belief. Maybe if people had a stake in their community instead of it being ruined by these morons then it might not be such a problem.

Get f*cked

+1

Dear policeman. Put your job and decent salary at risk to save yourself about £200 p/m (£2400 total) ps to save this money you need to live in a craphole and beat up drug dealers for a year.

Its ridiculous....maybe Busta will fly over from Malta and move an old fridge for me. There's £20 in it for him. Why wouldn't he? It's something I need someone to do, so it MUST be something he will want to do....that's how it works when you look at the world through just one viewpoint

The prices later in the thread tell me everything I need to know about the area. £450 p/m because that's what the social pay....without it the market rent would be much less. Anecdotal I know but I once asked a friend who lived in a similar area what type of price the houses went for - he honestly said...."you don't buy houses round here.....you just take them".

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Dear policeman. Put your job and decent salary at risk to save yourself about £200 p/m (£2400 total) ps to save this money you need to live in a craphole and beat up drug dealers for a year.

Its ridiculous....maybe Busta will fly over from Malta and move an old fridge for me. There's £20 in it for him. Why wouldn't he? It's something I need someone to do, so it MUST be something he will want to do....that's how it works when you look at the world through just one viewpoint

The prices later in the thread tell me everything I need to know about the area. £450 p/m because that's what the social pay....without it the market rent would be much less. Anecdotal I know but I once asked a friend who lived in a similar area what type of price the houses went for - he honestly said...."you don't buy houses round here.....you just take them".

Sad to say,

Quite a few Police Officers are Landlords.

They are not allowed to have a business interest, but nothing can be done about their wives having one.

Most of those in trouble are under 40 and living in private rented homes. They are Britain’s hidden working underclass, living hand-to-mouth with no capital to fall back on. Nearly nine million resorted to credit to pay for household expenses last year and six million, with no savings, borrow to cope with income shocks. It’s no coincidence that debt problems have mushroomed as consumer credit grew at 10 per cent a year, the fastest in more than a decade.

Over-leveraged landlords with tenants who are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. What could possibly go wrong.

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Busta somehow thinks his predicament can be solved with tactics from a primary school playground . Draft in cops and rugby players with the reward of a cheap flat ! ? These druggies are connected (maybe by default) to organised crime and drug criminals have guns and knives and are prepared to use .

I dont envy the his or the other residents situation but to move the druggies on will require a far better plan of action than the one he has . It could take months and it looks like only committed owner occupiers would have the incentive to save their homes and make their environment safe. Absentee landlords are the worst when a problemm occurs . He has no allies - stick it in the next auction Busta and accept the peanuts you will get.

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Busta somehow thinks his predicament can be solved with tactics from a primary school playground . Draft in cops and rugby players with the reward of a cheap flat ! ? These druggies are connected (maybe by default) to organised crime and drug criminals have guns and knives and are prepared to use .

I dont envy the his or the other residents situation but to move the druggies on will require a far better plan of action than the one he has . It could take months and it looks like only committed owner occupiers would have the incentive to save their homes and make their environment safe. Absentee landlords are the worst when a problemm occurs . He has no allies - stick it in the next auction Busta and accept the peanuts you will get.

If the solution to problem neighbourhoods was as easy as this, then urban crime would have been all but eradicated by now.

At least Busta will not need to worry about CGT on this particular property.

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I don't think this is an entirely unreasonable plan: he is essentially trying to hire a security guard, which might be effective. After all, he is only trying to move the problem somewhere else, rather than stop the anti-social behaviour. I think he's just under-estimating the cost. Assuming (and I have no idea) someone is willing to do part-time security for £200 a month, he is ignoring the fact he is also asking them to live in an awful, crime-infested dump, and he will need to cut the rent for that too. I am guessing here, but I think that if he's lucky, he would be able to pursuade the right person to stay and be a security guard if he charged £0 rent for a year (and perhaps throw in a sweetener by covering the council tax). I'm not trying a poke a stick in his eye: I think that would actually be a smart thing to do; and, as Lavalas said, he created this problem in the first place by taking property out of the hands of people with a stake in the community, so he should suffer some pain to fix it.

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So this chap has offshored himself and incorporated his business to minimise his tax footprint but now complains that public services aren't looking after the place as well as they should do. On top of that he thinks that he'll get since sympathy from public servants who've had real terms pay freezes for the best part of a decade.

Anyone have an account over there to point out the selfishness of his position?

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It's quite easy to deal with druggies. You just need to make the consequences of their actions unpalatable to them, which means disrupting their drug use and creating the threat that they will lose their drugs, which they are far more worried about than getting arrested or beaten up.

Back in the days when I did more exciting things for a living, I have had to deal with them. It isn't difficult, if you are vigilant and reasonable, but also able to make an effective threat and carry it out, they will simply follow a path of less resistance and go elsewhere. In all the times I dealt with heroin users I had only one physical confrontation, which was over in seconds. Smackheads cannot fight on smack, and rarely want to when not. They will only fight to protect their drugs. Dealers are a different matter.

To deal with a dealer, you need to have an in depth knowledge of who is who in the area - everything is connected. The bigger time dealers, other criminals & private security firms are all known to one another to an extent. Often there are complex relationships and past confrontations. Some dealers are just nobodies funding their own habits, others are not.

Inserting Police or a couple of rugby players into that situation won't work. No copper will get involved - they prefer to live outside the area they Police, which is entirely understandable. Being a big lump is no use in dealing with hardened criminals unless you also have a reputation or capacity for criminal violence. I used to play prop forward myself, but there are a few people in any town I will try to avoid confrontation with regardless of whether I would fancy my chances in a 1 on 1 fist fight. Get on the wrong side of them, there will be a knock at the door one night, and you'll get slashed with a Stanley knife. That's reality.

Anybody who wants to get involved in scumlording at the bottom end of the scale would be well advised to go for a drink in the pubs around the area they are buying into. If you wouldn't have the stomach for dealing with those people, it will end in tears.

Money talks and you can end any criminal issue by giving enough money to the right person. A rent deduction on a shit flat is not going to cut it.

It sounds from the article like this scumlord simply has an issue with heroin users. That can be dealt with quite easily by sending the right people to have a chat when the smackheads are in situ.

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I don't think this is an entirely unreasonable plan: he is essentially trying to hire a security guard, which might be effective.

Security guards have to be licensed by the Security Industry Authority. Amateur vigilantism is not legal.

And I'm not in any case convinced that calls for "burly Rugby prop forwards" and "hard ass ex military" men to "see what happens" implies that that is the desire at all.

8 minutes ago, disenfranchised said:

It's quite easy to deal with druggies. You just need to make the consequences of their actions unpalatable to them, which means disrupting their drug use and creating the threat that they will lose their drugs, which they are far more worried about than getting arrested or beaten up.

Also worth remembering that the people being targeted here are explicitly children: "young ‘hoodies’".

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It's quite easy to deal with druggies. You just need to make the consequences of their actions unpalatable to them, which means disrupting their drug use and creating the threat that they will lose their drugs, which they are far more worried about than getting arrested or beaten up.

Back in the days when I did more exciting things for a living, I have had to deal with them. It isn't difficult, if you are vigilant and reasonable, but also able to make an effective threat and carry it out, they will simply follow a path of less resistance and go elsewhere. In all the times I dealt with heroin users I had only one physical confrontation, which was over in seconds. Smackheads cannot fight on smack, and rarely want to when not. They will only fight to protect their drugs. Dealers are a different matter.

To deal with a dealer, you need to have an in depth knowledge of who is who in the area - everything is connected. The bigger time dealers, other criminals & private security firms are all known to one another to an extent. Often there are complex relationships and past confrontations. Some dealers are just nobodies funding their own habits, others are not.

Inserting Police or a couple of rugby players into that situation won't work. No copper will get involved - they prefer to live outside the area they Police, which is entirely understandable. Being a big lump is no use in dealing with hardened criminals unless you also have a reputation or capacity for criminal violence. I used to play prop forward myself, but there are a few people in any town I will try to avoid confrontation with regardless of whether I would fancy my chances in a 1 on 1 fist fight. Get on the wrong side of them, there will be a knock at the door one night, and you'll get slashed with a Stanley knife. That's reality.

Anybody who wants to get involved in scumlording at the bottom end of the scale would be well advised to go for a drink in the pubs around the area they are buying into. If you wouldn't have the stomach for dealing with those people, it will end in tears.

Money talks and you can end any criminal issue by giving enough money to the right person. A rent deduction on a shit flat is not going to cut it.

It sounds from the article like this scumlord simply has an issue with heroin users. That can be dealt with quite easily by sending the right people to have a chat when the smackheads are in situ.

Well put . Unfortunately in North London most stabbings are by kids. A 40 something builder told some kids where to go and they stabbed him to death for refusing entry to the flats where he lived. . He was a big lump as well .....

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removing furniture from the area to make it less comfortable seems sensible. Leave some notes up to that effect (furniture will be removed for an extended period of time until anti-social behaviour has stopped). add a big heavy steel door also.

not a lot of point breaking in if all you reach is an empty room. not worth the effort. seems the easiest way to deal with them. of course if the residents actually owned their own dwellings they would care a bit more. who gives a toss about a leveraged greedy landlord, if you lived there you would treat the place badly knowing you can just rent elsewhere if it gets bad.

i (never did honest! haha) made use of the hallway plug sockets outside of my flat when renting, knowing the landlord would be paying for my electric bills through service charges, didn't care too much about blocking up the rubbish shoot with a cut up mattress as it was cheaper than getting it taken away. its all about having a stake in the place you live. when i moved out i hid the damage i did from a bodge when messed up putting up a heavy wall mirror with a wardrobe and never got anything taken off me from my deposit as they never looked there.

hence landlords often ruining areas and property prices from their own greed. and damaging their own investments at the same time.

I walked through Widnes and Warrington, past huge out-of-town shopping centres and through the wastelands of industrial decay. In Salford, down streets where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you could find them, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal doors, I found an Airbnb. My host was selling her terraced house. I sat in her living room as the estate agent brought around potential buyers. They were all buy-to-let investors from the south of England, building property portfolios in the poverty, as if this was one giant fire sale.

“Is this a thing now?” I asked the agent.

“It is,” he replied.

This is what this kind of BTL investor signs up for. If they want to build an empire in the poverty and exploit people who are less well of than themselves for money then they inevitably involve themselves in, and significantly exacerbate, social problems that they would otherwise be personally insulated from.

Addiction is complex. When the local situation is so dire that children are addicted then it's immensely tragic.

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Massive +1, and to the previous point on this tax exile complaining about UK services. This exploitation and extraction from other people's communities enrages the hell out of me. What business has this chump got in Halifax. I've employed some serious self moderation in this post

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I'm reminded of this, and the idea of middle class investors "building property portfolios in the poverty":

This is what this kind of BTL investor signs up for. If they want to build an empire in the poverty and exploit people who are less well of than themselves for money then they inevitably involve themselves in, and significantly exacerbate, social problems that they would otherwise be personally insulated from.

Addiction is complex. When the local situation is so dire that children are addicted then it's immensely tragic.

I liked that a good bit of marketing, and to overcome my addiction of reading the internet in the hope of seeing news of a HPC, find some cheap land/house etc.. i've ordered the book as the reviews are very good.